Land-use intensity alters networks between biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and services

Abstract

Land-use intensification can increase provisioning ecosystem services, such as food and timber production, but it also drives changes in ecosystem functioning and biodiversity loss, which may ultimately compromise human wellbeing. To understand how changes in land-use intensity affect the relationships between biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and services, we built networks from correlations between the species richness of 16 trophic groups, 10 ecosystem functions, and 15 ecosystem services. We evaluated how the properties of these networks varied across land-use intensity gradients for 150 forests and 150 grasslands. Land-use intensity significantly affected network structure in both habitats. Changes in connectance were larger in forests, while changes in modularity and evenness were more evident in grasslands. Our results show that increasing land-use intensity leads to more homogeneous networks with less integration within modules in both habitats, driven by the belowground compartment in grasslands, while forest responses to land management were more complex. Land-use intensity strongly altered hub identity and module composition in both habitats, showing that the positive correlations of provisioning services with biodiversity and ecosystem functions found at low land-use intensity levels, decline at higher intensity levels. Our approach provides a comprehensive view of the relationships between multiple components of biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and ecosystem services and how they respond to land use. This can be used to identify overall changes in the ecosystem, to derive mechanistic hypotheses, and it can be readily applied to further global change drivers.